Speed Training For Marathoners

Sometimes it seems as though there are nearly as many marathon training programs as races. But if your marathon times have plateaued—or simply don't live up to what you think you might be capable of doing—it might be time to take a hard look at your own plan and see if it has enough speed work. Many plans focus on quantity of training, rather than quality, months of buildup with weekly long runs and grueling high-volume weeks. Such training, however, crowds out other forms of training that might give you more bang for your training effort. There's general agreement among scientists and coaches that running fast in training can improve our oxygen processing and help us run more economically—and therefore faster—in the marathon.

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STILL RUNNING LONG

This doesn't mean you should ditch all of your prior training. "If you have to choose between intervals or long runs, I'd say long runs are better," says Tom McGlynn, founder of Run Coach, an online training program.

But there's no reason to do long runs every week, says Owen Anderson, elite coach and exercise physiologist, in his new book, Running Science. Instead, he argues, weekly long runs increase injury risk and leave you too tired for high-quality workouts during the rest of the week. "Implicit in the philosophy of the long run is the suggestion that the human body will somehow forget how to go long…unless a weekly battering is administered to the leg muscles," he writes. "Nothing could be further from the truth!"

Overreliance on the long run may stem in part from a misguided effort to emulate the elites without realizing the difference between our long runs and theirs. For an elite running 140 miles a week, 20 miles is an average day, and doing 20 moderately paced ones in a single run may not be as big a shock to the legs for them as for us. (In fact, Joan Benoit Samuelson once used the phrase "20-mile recovery run" to describe some of her training runs at the peak of her career.)

But for those of us on lower mileage, Anderson suggests that we might do better to cut out half of the super-long runs and focus more on speed.

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UPPING THE OXYGEN

One part of the speed formula is lactate threshold. (See "Find Your Tempo".) But another ingredient is more intense speed work built around a variable known as VO2 max.

VO2 max is a laboratory measure of the maximum amount of oxygen your body can process at peak effort. In other words, it's a measure of the power of your aerobic engine with all the part—heart, lungs, capillaries and muscles—working at aerobic maximum. VO2 max is important because it's been long-known that there's a rough correlation between it and racing performance. A 3:20 marathoner, for example, might have a VO2 max of 45 to 50. In 2006, Ryan Hall in his prime tested at 78. That means that if you're a 3:20 marathoner, you might, in theory, be able to close up to one-sixth of the gap between you and Hall—a whopping 12 to 13 minutes—by adding a mere 5 points to your VO2 max.

But like many things at the intersection between exercise physiology and training, it's not that simple. Yes, you can indeed improve your VO2 max. But probably not by as much as you'd like. VO2 max is developed through years of training at high intensities (with possible assists from altitude training, altitude tents and heat training). In a 1978 study in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, a team led by Jack Daniels, author of Daniels' Running Formula, found that the average runner can increase it by only 5 percent to 15 percent—depressing news for most of those trying to turn a 4-hour marathon into a Boston qualifier.

Also, there comes a level at which experienced runners have probably already made the bulk of their potential gains. For example, after tracking 33 elite Spanish runners through four years of intense training, a 2005 study in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness led by Alejandro Legaz-Arrese of the University of Saragossa, Spain, found the runners' VO2 max levels to be essentially unchanged.

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"In a nutshell, VO2 max reaches a plateau if you train hard," says John Halliwill, an exercise physiologist at the University of Oregon.

That said, many of us may not have trained hard enough to have hit the plateau encountered by Legaz-Arrese's Spanish runners. "People in very intense training programs, working daily with a coach, are pushing themselves to the point where they're probably not going to make changes in VO2 max," Halliwill says. "But others may have reached a temporary plateau, [and] if they did a more aggressive program they might see additional gains." Thus, it is worth spending time, even in marathon training, pushing this variable.

VELOCITY AT MAX

Even if your VO2 max has plateaued, though, there's another piece to the puzzle, called vVO2 max.

This is the pace you're running when your body first hits VO2 max. (The extra v means velocity.) It's by no means your top pace, but aerobically, you're maxed out. Anderson estimates it's about the pace you can maintain in a 6- to 10-minute time trial—somewhere between 1500m and 3K race pace, for most of us. A 6-minute all-out time trial, in fact, is a good way of estimating it.

Several factors other than VO2 max help determine vVO2 max, mostly related to running economy—the body's ability to make the best of the aerobic power nature and years of training have given it. And becoming more economical is where this 6-minute pace relates to a 3- to 4-hour race.

Halliwill suggests that the forward propulsion we get from any given amount of energy might be malleable, perhaps physiologically or perhaps simply by the effect of training on what Halliwill calls "the economy of how we move--whether we're wasting a lot of energy or doing it in the most economical way."

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McGlynn adds that speed training also forces the body to learn to make use of "higher" energy systems not taxed during slower workouts. "The benefit is that you develop energy systems that utilize higher rates of glycogen and less fat than marathon pace," he says. "As you become more economical at faster paces, in theory you should become more economical with fat utilization at the slower pace, the marathon pace." He also notes that such training helps the body deal with glycogen depletion late in the marathon.

Veronique Billat, an exercise physiologist at the University of Lille, France, sees yet another speed-training advantage from improvements in your legs' "elastic energy reinstitution"—basically the rebound you get from stretched muscles as you launch from one stride into the next.

WHAT IT MEANS FOR MARATHONERS

What this means for marathon training is that you should be including some type of intervals, either on the track or in fartleks. McGlynn suggests a combination of short intervals (200m-400m) at somewhere between 1500m race pace and vVO2 max, and longer intervals such as miles, 1200s or 1,000s, at 10K pace. For the short intervals, he suggests a total volume of up to 8 percent of your weekly total, once every other week. For the long ones, he suggests two workouts every three weeks, each at up to 10 to 12 percent of total weekly volume. Thus, a 60-mile-per-week runner might do 6-7 × 1 mile, or 12 × 1,000m, all at 10K pace.

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Brendan Cournane, a Chicago-based marathon coach, also likes long intervals (about 4-6 minutes) but prefers to make them slightly faster, with the pace gradually cutting down toward 5K pace as the season progresses. As the marathon approaches, he also shortens the recoveries, dropping them to as little as 45 seconds.

Billat advocates going even faster, on even shorter recoveries, focusing on running at vVO2 max, which she believes is a "key factor" for race performance at all distances from the 1500 to the marathon. Over the years, she has developed several vVO2 max training protocols, but her favorite is a very fast fartlek.

It requires a heart-rate monitor, a fairly precise knowledge of your vVO2 max (either from a lab test or a 6-minute time trial), and a GPS watch or good sense of pace. After a warm-up, you pick up your pace to vVO2 max and hold it for a minute. Cut back to tempo pace (perhaps 40 seconds/mile slower) until your heart rate drops by about 15 beats per minute. Then speed back up to vVO2 max, but for only 30 seconds this time. Repeat tempo-pace recoveries and 30-second surges as long as you can. If this sounds a bit like Steve Prefontaine's famous "in-and-out" 200s (run, for him, as alternating 200s at 30 seconds and 40 seconds), you're on the right track—though Pre might have been going a bit fast for this particular workout formula.

RACE SHORT

Such training only works if you do something unnatural to many marathoners: Run a short race or time trial. This race would be 6 minutes long for Billat's 30-second intervals or a 5K for Cournane's Chicago Marathon trainers.

"I want them to know what their 5K pace is," Cournane says of his trainees. "A recent 5K, not four or five years ago.

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Tom Derderian, coach of the Greater Boston Track Club, adds that short races are valuable in and of themselves.

One benefit is psychological. If you run a few 5Ks, your marathon will feel more relaxed. "You'll know you can run faster," he says.

But short races are also useful for learning pace. "[The] 5K requires a visceral sensitivity to what is too fast," Derderian says. While marathons are much slower-paced, there's still the need to balance on the cusp between your ideal pace and getting overextended. And while the consequences of getting overextended are different in each race distance, the 5K and the marathon are unforgiving of pacing errors. In the 5K, if you go too fast, you fall into oxygen debt and have to back off, only to discover that by the time you've recovered, the finish is there and it's too late. In the marathon, going out too fast means turning the last miles into a death march. But in both cases, Derderian says, there is a cusp and "you have to feel it." In preparing to face this, he says, "racing is the best preparation, particularly at distances shorter than your ultimate race."

Although their workout suggestions vary, Billat, Derderian, McGlynn and Cournane are all saying the same basic thing: To get faster at the marathon, you need to do some of your training at substantially faster-than-marathon paces.

But if there's a single one-size-fits-all magic formula, nobody's yet proven it. "[When] we look at classic, elite athletes over the decades, we find there are lots of combinations that seem to lead to success," Halliwill says.

And that's actually good news, because who wants to do the same workout over and over? Not to mention that, most likely, doing so would just be another way to get plateaued again. More fun, and more effective, is to vary your training, fine-tuning your program to include a selection of both bread-and-butter "comfort food" workouts you know and like, while cautiously adding new ones that might help you break through to yet another new level.

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Not All At OnceFit in multiple types of training through periodization.

Many coaches see benefits to periodization, in which you shift training focuses in an effort to peak your fitness for the specific race you want to run. (See "Schedule a Breakthrough" for more on periodization.) Thus, a six- to 12-month marathon training cycle might begin with a primary emphasis on base mileage, progress into speed training, shift from there into threshold running, and (possibly) put the final touches on with a return to speed. "You can periodize a plan to include half marathon training, then 10K, 5K and back to half marathon, all while getting in the super-long runs," says Bob Williams, a Portland, Ore.-based coach whose clients include 1:03 half marathoner Aissa Dghoughi. Layne Anderson, coach of 2:30 Olympic marathoner Diane Nukuri-Johnson, says, "I even used a mile race indoor last March for Diane during her preparation for Boston. I am a firm believer that the faster you are and feel, the more comfortable the goal marathon pace [will] be."

The Research: A study published in the journal Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine by Dutch researchers at TNO Behavioral and Societal Sciences research organization in Soesterberg, The Netherlands, put cyclists through two 20-minute all-out tests, one after they had had a normal night's sleep, the other after keeping the riders up all night. The athletes performed nearly identically after the night of sleep deprivation, but the lack of sleep did have a psychological effect. When asked to estimate how far they went, they underestimated the distance covered by nearly 15 percent.

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The Advice: The study affirms the conventional wisdom that one night's bad sleep won't sabotage your race. But it may affect your confidence and ability to accurately judge effort, which could impair your racing ability. Bottom line: Try to get a good night's sleep, but if impossible, don't panic (even if you feel like it).

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